Sierra Club Hikers Begin Protest Trek

The hikers met Saturday morning at the wooded edge of the stucco subdivisions in the west San Fernando Valley.

But instead of winding up the sandy trails through the coyote brush and live oak below Castle Rock, they turned and headed down Vanowen Street, beginning a four-day trek into one of the world’s largest urban sprawls.

About 30 environmentalists, protesting the region’s lack of open space, began a 42-mile march between two major proposed construction projects they are fighting: the Playa Vista development near Marina del Rey--where the DreamWorks SKG movie studio has been proposed--and the Ahmanson Ranch project in Ventura County.

Sponsored by the Sierra Club, the second annual Earth, Water, Air--L.A. march will follow the ancient course of the Los Angeles River, which originally formed the Ballona Wetlands before changing course and flowing to Long Beach.

“It’s all to raise awareness about the value of these treasures that are now in jeopardy,” said Vince Curtis, a member of Save Open Space, the organization that has spearheaded opposition to the Ahmanson Ranch development.

The protesters chose to start at Castle Rock, a sandstone outcropping in West Hills, because they say it is symbolic of Southern California’s rapid expansion at the expense of open land: It is the headwaters of the L.A. River, it was a sacred Native American site for two ancient cultures and it is now threatened by the prospect of 3,050 homes being built at Ahmanson Ranch, just across the county line. The end of the route is equally significant. The Ballona Wetlands are the last 200 acres of a marsh that once stretched from Venice to the bluffs of Playa del Rey and provided natural flood control and hosted hundreds of animal and plant species. It is still a major migratory stop for birds.

“We want people to know Ahmanson, the L.A. River and the Ballona Wetlands are culturally and geographically one system,” said Susan Suntree, a coordinator of the event. “People don’t think of L.A. as a living landscape.”

As the group moves through the Valley and then across the Los Angeles Basin to the coast, they will camp at Balboa Lake and Griffith Park and sleep in a Presbyterian church in Koreatown. All the way, they will hold lectures and hand out fliers denouncing the two construction projects and supporting restoration of the once-meandering Los Angeles River.

Monday morning, the group plans to hold a press conference on proposals for the river at an old train yard near downtown Los Angeles that is now the subject of various development proposals.

Suntree said they support plans to divert river water into two defunct railroad switching yards that are up for sale. The plans would create riverside parks and revive irrigation canals built by early Spanish and Mexican settlers.

“We need to save the Taylor Yard,” said Suntree. “We need to think of the cities that have restored their rivers. We could have greenbelts and shops and boardwalks along our river.”

The group began walking Saturday after performing a Chumash Indian ritual meant to give them strength. Chanting and rhythmically tapping sticks, two Chumash men carried an abalone shell with burning white sage. They wafted the smoke onto each of the marchers with a hawk feather. Then they blew deeply through a conch shell, sending a resonating moan over the neighborhood.

An archeologist explained that before Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed up the coast in 1542, Castle Rock was called kas’elew and was the home of a malevolent shaman named Munit. “Right in front of Munit’s cave, they’ll be building rich people’s homes,” Chester King told the crowd.

Many of the marchers wore costumes of endangered animals in Southern California.

“I’m a peregrine falcon, can’t you tell?” said one woman wearing a lampshade. Others wore towering puppet costumes that symbolized various natural elements, from fire and water to the L.A. River and the Ballona Wetlands.

Last year, one of those very elements taught Jan Williamson, the costume designer, a physics lesson. “There were 60-mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds,” she said. “These puppets were like sails.”

This year, she made them more aerodynamic.

After the ceremony, the hikers packed up the Starbucks coffee and the Price Club muffins, got out the bullhorns, and began their eastward march. Most were activists against either the Playa Vista commercial and residential project, which has recently been beset by delays, or the Ahmanson project.

Allaire Patterson, 33, an actress who lives in the High Desert, has long opposed Playa Vista. She carried her 9-month-old baby.

“I did it last year pregnant,” said Patterson, who was dressed like a frog. She and several other performers planned to stage a play tonight, in which she is the endangered Ballona Pacific Tree Frog.

“My own fantasy--my own frog fantasy--is for DreamWorks not only not to build, but to restore the wetlands completely,” she said.

Some protesters, such as Donald Brooks and Traci Winters, came from Riverside to show support for a grass-roots effort against corporate developers and to call attention to the plight of Southern California’s vanishing open space.

“We live in a place where there is not much of an environmental movement,” said Brooks, 23. “And I’m not big on corporations.”

Times staff writer Coll Metcalfe contributed to this story from Ventura.